Robert E. Lerner

Professor of History Emeritus; Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities Emeritus

Interests

Principal Research Interest(s):
Medieval Europe

Biography

Robert E. Lerner (Ph.D., Princeton, 1964), Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities Emeritus, is a medieval historian working on millenarian movements, heresy, and religious, intellectual, and cultural history. He has written or co-authored ten books, including The Age of Adversity, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, The Powers of Prophecy, The Feast of Saint Abraham, Western Civilizations (co-authored), and, most recently, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life. Many of his articles have appeared in various French, German, Italian, and Catalan translations. Currently he is engaged in supervising an international work project funded by the European Research Council dedicated to editing a large number of vernacular translations of a fourteenth-century Latin millenarian treatise.

A Fellow of the Medieval Academy and the American Academy in Rome, he has been a member of the Institute of Advanced Study and has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the Max Planck Society of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).